Just like the Sheryl Sherrod story, a right winger blogger, in this case Andrea Tantaros who is also a Fox News Contributor, wrote a ridiculous column in the New York Daily Mail comparing First Lady Michelle Obama to The French Queen Marie-Antoinette,Limbaugh followed the attacks using race-baiting as you would expect from him.
Of course, since the "liberal" MSM, as usual, repeat the Right-Wingnuts talking points without doing their job, the Faux Scandal of First Lady Michelle Obama's vacations in Spain is all over the airwaves.On Friday, on CNN, Don Lemon devoted a long segment trying to paint Michelle Obama as out of touch or as a Marie-Antoinette wannabe. Doris Kearns Goodwin was his guest, she tried to downplay the all "outrage". But Don Lemon didn't even care when Mrs Goodwin told him that Michelle Obama's trip wasn't unusual and the outrage was misplaced. She told him that the security costs would have been the same even if she was at the White House. He cut her off as soon as he could since she wasn't bashing the First Lady.
Then on Saturday, on MSNBC, Norah O'Donnell had a segment reporting the security costs for the trip and claimed that WH was surprised by the outrage and the controversy. Funny how we didn't see the Media whining about the security costs for other first Ladies before Mrs Obama. She is the First Lady of the US and the first African-America first lady of the US, of course her life is in high risk. Her life has no cost as far I'm concerned.Not to mention that Spain was the theater of deadly terrorist attack in 2004.
As usual, Alex Swiff brought Pat Buchanan and a Democratic Strategist discussing First Lady Michelle Obama's trip. Of course, Pat Buchanan couldn't waste the occasion to bash the First Lady. He claimed that it was a bad PR move and that it would hurt Obama and Dems in the polls (RME).
Today, it's Maureen Dowd's turn to scream "OUTRAGE". In her sunday New York Time's column, Mrs Dowd wrote that Michelle Obama should have stayed in DC making her husband "toasts" or "martinis" instead of flying oversea with her daughter. She wrote
In politics and pop culture, optics are all. And Michelle’s optics sent a message that likely made some in the White House and the Democratic Party wince.
She seemed to be gigging her husband a bit: I’m going to do what I want to do. I can’t worry about whether it gives the Tea Partiers ammo or makes Democrats (including you) campaigning against the excesses of the rich look hypocritical. Even if the country is sliding into a double-dip recession, I’m going abroad to a five-star hotel on Air Force Two and give a boost to another country’s economy.
Then she goes on to say that :
To defray possible criticism of their upcoming 10-day trip to Martha’s Vineyard, Michelle belatedly agreed to a weekend family vacation on Florida’s gulf coast. On Friday, Spanish police closed a public beach for the American entourage. If Michelle had wanted a closed beach, she could have headed to our gulf sooner. There are plenty of multi-star hotels there, and she and the girls could have cleaned a few pelicans.
The spanish police and the Secret Services closed the beach not because Michelle Obama asked them to, but for security reasons. I love how those idiots act like Michelle Obama and her daughters' lives aren't in danger.
Maureen Dowd, who has talked to President Obama's senior advisor David Axelrod, claims that Mr Axelrod told her that "not everything is political theater ". She wrote that David Axelrod told her :
Folks in the public eye are also human beings. If you have the ability to show your kid a part of the world and you can do that together before they get to the age where they don’t want to do anything with you, I don’t think it’s right that you have to defer it because of the politics.
In fairness to Maureen Dowd, in her article, she praised at some point the First Lady but ala Maureen Dowd Style of course :
The job of first lady, tightly constrained by convention, is hard for modern women. Michelle is a gutsy Harvard Law School grad who started as her husband’s mentor. Any coloring outside the lines can cause problems, as Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton learned when lampooned as Marie Antoinettes.
Michelle has done such a good job that she silenced her vituperative conservative critics for a year and a half. But perhaps the strain of debunking that "angry black woman" stereotype by playing the smiling, conventional first lady, talking to Ladies’ Home Journal about vegetable cleanses and portion sizes, made her want to assert her independence in the one place she could: her schedule.
From the day that Michelle Obama's trip to Spain was reported, The Right Wingers are going nuts. From Tantaros to Rush Limbaugh. As reported by MMFA, the right wingnuts are now suffering from a Michelle Obama derangement syndrome.
Here Rush Limbaugh asserting that the MSM "were ignoring" Michelle Obama's trip because of our "slaves past"
According to MMFA, Instapundit blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds is highlighting a post by conservative blogger Roger Simon in which Reynolds calls Michelle Obama "a modern-day Marie Antoinette". Reynolds posted the following illustration of Michelle Obama next to his ridiculous article.
Thank God that we still have Newsweek to debunk that kind of ridiculous "scandal". In fact, Newsweek's Daniel Stone wrote a great piece calling out the faux outrage over First Lady Michelle Obama's trip to Spain. Stone wrote that he called the White House to verify if the rumor of the 60 reserved rooms was true :
We checked with the White House for a price breakdown of the trip, looking for a smoking gun. And honestly, there isn’t one. The bulk of the trip—the hotel stay and all meals—were paid for by the Obamas and their close friends who joined them. "Any additional footprint," says a White House aide, "including additional rooms needed for security support, falls under the same rules as have applied to any previous first-family travel: the costs are split appropriately, with private expenses paid for privately; government expenses are paid for by the government."
According to Daniel Stone, the First Lady doesn't travel with that big of security detail as reported by the Media.
The Secret Service obviously won’t discuss the extent of her protective covering. But she’s nothing like her husband, or any recent past president, who has been known to have a 20-car (or more) motorcade, as well as two planes, up to three helicopters, and more than 100 staffers for even ordinary puddle-jumping trips for a speech about the economy. (...)
But the Secret Service would say that it’s just part of the cost of having an executive and keeping him safe. Perhaps it could be done for cheaper, the way British Prime Minister David Cameron crossed the pond last month on a commercial airliner. By that logic, maybe it’s time for an honest accounting of exactly what kind of image the first family needs to represent America, or how big a security detail is actually needed to protect them. But a four-day trip overseas hardly seems like the best example of a system out of control.
Seriously, Michelle Obama isn't an elected official, she has the right the take vacation wherever she wants to. It's August, summer time, her daughter is out of school, her big sister is away, she barely spends time with her father during school time, so it's normal for the First Lady who is also a mother to take some time away with her daughter in order to make her feel special. As Daniel Stone pointed :
Or to ask that as long as she’s living in the White House, she only take vacations that "look" appropriate. The only really upsetting part is that, well, the rest of us are still sitting at our desks.